Hi folks! Yesterday, I joined the club and installed PostmarketOS+phosh on my “new” OnePlus6. Besides a usb-c (power only) cable that cost me an hour to troubleshoot, everything went smoothly.

Well, nearly everything. What I cant figure out at this point is how to install and get software. I’m on the latest stable release which might have been a mistake but I’m usually quite cautious at first.

So my problem is pmos came with 16 apps preinstalled and the software app only shows these when I open it. Can someone confirm or deny if this is normal? I asked around in 5 different places for stuff in the last 16 hrs (yes, I did sleep in between) and I know a lot of stuff now but this I could not figure out. :D

I know I can install flatpak, which I did but it never shows any results at all which I find unrealistic. I put in the repo like it is shown in the wiki and I have internet. Something else must be wrong.

I’m an admin by trade and I do some software development as a hobby so feel free to assume I know how to use the command line. I’m only a full time linux user for maybe half a year.

Anybody got ideas what might be wrong?

  • hauiOPEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    So its essentially like this for two years now… all the apps hang in alpine testing and none make it to postmarketOS. Thats sad.

    I filed a bunch of issues today and started testing with phoc and phosh on my pc to help speed this up a little but without a real process its slow and draining.

    Its a great project but the wiki needs to be more detailed and honest. I requested an account to help with that.

    Thanks for mentioning it.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•8 months ago

      Alpine edge testing apps are in postmarketOS edge. So yeah, not all of them make it to stable, but quite a few do:

      For software listed on https://linuxphoneapps.org/ the count is as follows: Alpine 3.19: 160 Alpine edge: 198

      (Source: https://linuxphoneapps.org/packaged-in/)

      The difference should be mostly the apps that have not made it beyond testing, yet.

      Please note that you can also try installing testing apps on stable by apk add PKGNAME --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing, or, maybe as more safe way of doing this, use distrobox, install alpine:latest in it, and changing /etc/apk/repositories/ to make it edge instead of 3.19.

      You can also try to build some software that’s not packaged by coming up with your own APKBUILDs, I did so a while ago on https://framagit.org/linmobapps/apkbuilds, maybe the notes I left there can be helpful to you.

      Regarding Wikis: They always get stale, so clarifications and additions are surely welcome!

      • PureTryOutMEnglish
        2•8 months ago

        Please note that you can also try installing testing apps on stable by apk add PKGNAME --repository=http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/testing

        Please don’t ever suggest this. That approach is prone to breakage and shouldn’t be used. You’re installing an app built against edge on a stable release which has different versions of libraries and might even be missing dependencies entirely. If you want something from testing, just switch to edge and enable the entire testing repo.

      • hauiOPEnglish
        2•8 months ago

        Thanks for the suggestions. Thats exactly the route I‘m taking. I made an account on alpines gitlab and also did a gnome app tutorial to make some rudimentary things for the phone.

        While we‘re at it: do you know if there is any way to get alpine apk visible in gnome software? Its driving me nuts that flatpak is visible and apk which is a lot of stuff can only be installed through cli.

          • hauiOPEnglish
            1•8 months ago

            Thanks a lot for mentioning this. In other words, this does work on edge. But it does not work for me on stable… the question being if its because stable or because of a bug…

            • @[email protected]English
              2•8 months ago

              It did work on edge at the time of that post (March 2023), and IIRC it may have worked in stable 23.06 (the release right after that post) - I don’t have a device still running that to confirm. It since broke again, and it’s currently broken in stable and testing (it’s definitely broken for me in edge in both Plasma Mobile (KDE Discover) and Phosh/GNOME Mobile (GNOME Software). So don’t go to edge because of this, especially not right now.

              • hauiOPEnglish
                2•8 months ago

                Wow! Now I‘m somehow more informed and confused at the same time which is on par for my experience with linux phones so far :D

                Thank you very much for elaborating. This is really important info for me.

                So, it might be my device on 23.12 stable that is having issues but it might also be 23.12 itself that is causing this. Please correct me if thats wrong.

                • @[email protected]English
                  2•8 months ago

                  As flatpak apps show (correct?) your situation is not different from what I would expect. I installed 23.12 on one of my devices and see a similar behavior. Generally, assuming you did start with a Phosh image or used pmbootstrap and chose phosh as UI (and did not, say, start out with Plasma Mobile and then switched over to Phosh, which can cause weirdness), I think we can safely say that this not just an issue on your end. This is very likely a general issue on 23.12 and edge currently.

                  Why isn’t it fixed already? It sure seems to be difficult, and most “long termers” (extrapolating from my own behavior) likely have given up on using front-ends like GNOME Software or KDE Discover and have become fluent enough with apk and flatpak on the terminal and thus don’t contribute to a solution.

                  • hauiOPEnglish
                    1•8 months ago

                    Makes total sense! Thanks.

                    • Yes, flatpaks show
                    • No, I didnt change anything. I just installed the latest img and flatpak after.

                    Would you suggest I open up an issue then?

    • @ag10nEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      It is not a product as so much a project. I would recommend reading up on the goals and mission of postmarketos and instead support rather than point out shortcomings.

      If you are a developer I’m sure the team would be happy to give write access but considering your novice experience your opinion is likely less important than actually improving things.

      Testing out the x86 builds using qemu is typically the first step to understanding and if you want to make changes, opening a PR or demonstrating your value to the project would make it more worthwhile for them.

      I’m am a follower of this project myself and have nothing to do with postmarketos or the wiki.

      • hauiOPEnglish
        1•8 months ago

        It is not a product as so much a project.

        I know

        I would recommend reading up on the goals and mission of postmarketos and instead support rather than point out shortcomings.

        Thats what I‘m doing. I‘m opening issues all over the place, using my laptop to debug stuff and will likely make PRs soon but as I said, it takes a long time to understand stuff because no process. I‘d suggest you take constructive criticism as a positive thing instead of undermining my effort.

        There is a general misunderstanding between folks that posts like mine are anything but a way to both give feedback, point to onboarding issues and asking for direction. Pointing out that someone „demonstrate their value“ is one reason our world is so fucked. I dont need to demonstrate my value. I fix things and I help with things. If people dont see value in that, they can f off.

        I know you likely mean good so I will just turn around now and read up on the qemu stuff and try to provide more help and fixes.